The present invention relates to a method for replacing a contact in a right angle connector which is mounted to a circuit board.
Circuit boards are generally interconnected in three dimensional arrays comprising a motherboard and a plurality of parallel daughterboards at right angles thereto. To provide pluggability, elongate electrical connectors are fixed to the motherboard in a parallel array; complementary elongate right angle connectors are fixed to the edges of respective daughterboards. The right angle connectors have a mating face at a right angle to the face mounted against the daughterboard, the contacts therein having right angle bends between the faces. Typically, the connector fixed to the motherboard has a pin array in the mating face and the connector fixed to the daughterboard has an array of socket contacts in the mating face and compliant pins or solder tails extending from the mounting face. Such connectors are sold by AMP incorporated as the AMP HDI connectors, described in AMP Data Sheet No. 81-655.
The above described connectors can be quite long and have large numbers of contacts. The AMP HDI connector, for example, is available with four rows of contacts totalling 684 positions in a connector eighteen inches long. It is thus quite expensive to replace a connector having a faulty contact. Accordingly, it would be desirable to replace only the faulty contact without removing the entire connector.